Ball Four

The 50th Anniversary edition of ';the book that changed baseball' (NPR), chosen by Time magazine as one of the ';100 Greatest Non-Fiction' books. When Ball Four was published in 1970, it created a firestorm. Bouton was called a Judas, a Benedict Arnold, and a ';social leper' for having violated the ';sanctity of the clubhouse.' Baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn tried to force Bouton to sign a statement saying the book wasn't true. Ballplayers, most of whom hadn't read it, denounced the book. It was even banned by a few libraries. Almost everyone else, however, loved Ball Four. Fans liked discovering that athletes were real peopleoften wildly funny people. David Halberstam, who won a Pulitzer for his reporting on Vietnam, wrote a piece in Harper's that said of Bouton: ';He has written... a book deep in the American vein, so deep in fact that it is by no means a sports book.' Today Ball Four has taken on another roleas a time capsule of life in the sixties. ';It is not just a diary of Bouton's 1969 season with the Seattle Pilots and Houston Astros,' says sportswriter Jim Caple. ';It's a vibrant, funny, telling history of an era that seems even further away than four decades. To call it simply a ';tell all book' is like describing The Grapes of Wrath as a book about harvesting peaches in California.' Includes a new foreword by Jim Boutons wife, Paula Kurman ';An irreverent, best-selling book that angered baseball's hierarchy and changed the way journalists and fans viewed the sports world.' The Washington Post